speech, the alteration in the spoken tongue would be comparatively
rapid.

Such dropping of terminations is precisely what did happen before the
Norman Conquest in those parts of England most overrun by the Danes.
There, the adjectives lost their terminations to indicate gender and
case, and the article "the" ceased to be declined.

Even if the Normans had not come to England, the dropping of the
inflections would not have ceased. Many authorities think that the
grammatical structure of English would, even in the absence of that
event, have evolved into something like its present form. Of course
the Norman Conquest hastened many grammatical changes that would
ultimately have resulted from inherent causes, but it did not exercise
as great an influence as was formerly ascribed to it. Philologists
find it impossible to assign the exact amount of change due to the
Conquest and to other causes. Let us next notice some changes other
than the loss of inflections.

Change in Gender.--Before any one could speak Anglo-Saxon correctly,
he had first to learn the fanciful genders that were attached to
nouns: "trousers" was feminine; "childhood," masculine; "child,"
neuter. During this period the English gradually lost these fanciful
genders which the German still retains. A critic thus illustrates the
use of genders in that language: "A German gentleman writes a
masculine letter of feminine love to a neuter young lady with a
feminine pen and feminine ink on masculine sheets of neuter paper, and
incloses it in a masculine envelope with a feminine address to his
darling, though neuter, Gretchen. He has a masculine head, a feminine
hand, and a neuter heart."